Life — November 6, 1913 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE FLOWER OF THE LAND risks to do. For there are risks, of course, and if we are going to back him we must take them. S Lire goes to press the expecta- tion in New York is that Mr. Mitchel will be elected mayor, thanks largely to the Sulzer impeachment. We hope it will so turn out, since such a result would be a true reward of virtue—of the virtue in Sulzer that made him, once in the governor's office, revolt against Murphy, and of the virtue in Murphy that determined somewhat late, but on grounds that were just, that Sulzer was unfit to be governor and should be impeached. Under certain circumstances honest men come to their own, and if Mr. Mitchel is elected mayor it is a case in point. The popular enthusiasm for Sulzer in his old district in New York was awful, to be sure, but timely. The best warrant for it is in the fact that Sulzer was punished for doing good. It was the good he did as governor that undid him; not the bad he did in getting himself elected. He is to be credited, for example, with putting a man of in- tegrity (Mr. Carlisle) in charge of the huge expenditure of state money for 787 roads, and, for another thing, for the shakeup in the prisons. Mr. Blake, the commissioner he appointed to in- vestigate the prisons, made, up in zeal for what he lacked on his literary side. The manner of his reports Has been criticized, but the substance of them was true and important, and resflted in the appointment of the State Com- mission on Prison Reform, the chair- man of which, Mr. T. M. Osborne, spent a week as a convict in Auburn prison to see how it felt. That was a very humane service, requiring courage and self-sacrifice, and has re- sulted in recommendations in the re- port. of Mr. Osborne’s commission which will carry more weight because of the first-hand testimony on which they EN New England. was a more pious region than it is to-day, one of the plblic institutions of Massa- chusetts was the annual Fast Day, on which the inhabitants were expected to give themselves to fasting and prayer as a means of correcting evils which their uninspired intelligence was unequal to cope with. Our recol- lection is that Fast Day, being a public holiday, ran so strong to baseball and other profane uses that the General Court abolished it, but it is still avail- able in any state by special proclama- tion when public difficulties seem too complicated for ordinary solution. Perhaps we may have to fast and pray, yet, at the suggestion of our governors, over the currency bill, the drafting of which seems a matter that puts mere human intelligence to a very unusual strain. The brethren that have this important measure in hand keep at it hard, but are slow to agree. When they do agree, if ever, the country will have to take the result on faith and wait to see what it does to us. Not one voter in a thousand presumes to have an opinion on that bill, and those who have opinions do not agree. We are very much in the Lord's hands about that measure and cannot do much .more than hope for the best and support the administration. comicbooks.com